Beauty Is In The Eye Of The Beholder... UPDATE

What painters in the late middle ages thought was the epitome of feminine beauty...

...luscious, voluptuous, healthy, well-fed women who could fulfil their roles as wives, mothers, mistresses of households and reflected credit on their husbands and fathers, for being good providers...

This is what (mostly male) fashion designers now think beautiful women should look like...

...women who have no shape, no health, no female characteristics (including fertility), plucked, shaved pre-pubescent girls, almost androgynous... 

Do these men hate and fear fully grown, mature, natural, powerful women so much?

And why do we women let mal-adjusted males dictate to us what is normal and beautiful in the feminine form?

December 30th, 2010:
Isabelle Caro - the French model whose pictures are the first in the series above - has died from the effects of anorexia nervosa, a disease she had suffered from since she was 13. 

She is the third international model to die of anorexia-related causes in recent years.

Isabelle agreed to be the "face" of a campaign to warn young girls of the dangers of anorexia - she was  photographed and featured on a billboard during Fashion Week in the US in 2007...

 

Rest In Peace, Isabelle...

What We Don't Know Doesn't Hurt Us?

My mother told me once that for women, it hurts to be beautiful... 

We're poisoning ourselves every day... for our vanity, to catch a man (or woman) and/or under the false belief that we're caring for ourselves and our appearance...

And this is nothing new - we've been poisoning ourselves for millenia... For example, it used to be arsenic in face and hair powder that slowly killed us... 

 

You'd think we'd know better by now. But the companies making personal care and cosmetic products still use chemicals that are every bit as toxic and dangerous.  And now we use them on our babies and children too... 

Caveat Emptor - Buyer Beware

Mars and Venus - Do Looks Matter?

Why do women say looks don't matter, but then they don't give us average guys a chance?"   This complaint/question was the topic of a conversation I was involved in a while ago with some younger men...     
         
It seems to me we have some double standards operating here.   I've heard very few men say that for them 'looks don't matter' when they're talking about what it is they want in their 'ideal' partner.


But they do seem to have different criteria for women they're considering as their potential mates to those with whom they're having a casual relationship.


I remember a conversation with my first husband when we began to get serious; we were talking about former boyfriends/girlfriends and the whole sex thing.


We were discussing attraction - what was necessary to develop any kind of relationship and whether there was a difference in what men were looking for if sex was the only thing on their minds.   One of his previous 'connections' was mentioned during this conversation. I remember asking him if he had been attracted to this person. As a young woman, I was quite shocked and upset to hear his reply that the general consensus amongst his peers was:
"One doesn't look at the mantelpiece when one is stoking the fire"


I find it a little confusing to hear surprise and an "it's not fair, what about the average guy?" lament expressed when men find that women can also have preferences.


Men have been judging women in the looks department for the entire history of the human race and have been refusing to date women who don't look like "Barbie", or Bo Derek or Naomi or whoever is the latest airbrushed fantasy doll.


Remember all the women down through the ages who were considered 'homely', who were the wallflowers at the local dances - trying to believe their elders telling them that it wasn't their looks that counted but what's on the inside and that a genuine person would see that in them and be attracted to them.


So many women living in fear of being that dreaded class - spinsters - because men didn't find them attractive.


I notice on many men's dating site profiles that they are quite picky and detailed in what they find attractive/acceptable/unacceptable about a woman's looks.


Some men are quite specific in their criteria; I've seen men write that they like their women to be all 'girly' - makeup, mini skirts, and high heels.   One person was really specific - the heels, he stated, needed to be more than two inches high, and the woman should wear them on casual occasions also.   Men have no idea what it takes to maintain that look or what kind of restrictions it puts on your life and activities, or how bad it is for your back and feet to be wobbling along on stilts that pinch your toes all day.


It seems to me these men don't want to be real - have a real relationship with a real, living, walking, talking, feeling human being. They want to live in an illusion.   Good luck to them and pity the women they connect with, having to maintain that facade for him for the rest of their lives; the minute they forget to put on their lippy one day and the wrinkles come, he'll be off looking for a younger,'taut and terrific' version (see movies such as The First Wives Club)


Times have changed.   Most (western) women don't need partners to survive in life, so maybe they aren't accepting whatever's on offer just out of desperation, and now many men are finding out what it feels like to be judged in a superficial manner.


Love it - Karma - what goes around comes around.   Now that the boot's on the other foot, is this complaint sour grapes because some young men don't have the brawn to make the football team (and score with the cheerleaders) or the brains to get into Harvard where all the thinking chicks will line up and fight for them and hang on every word they utter?


And the serious side of that is that this is an opportunity for men and women to move beyond the surface of both themselves and of each other, for growth and understanding and acceptance (not just tolerance) of diversity.   

Real Women - What Are Men Afraid Of?

I think human beings don't like to remember that biologically we are animals, we are related to the apes and apes are more or less hairy! 

Heaven forbid that we acknowledge that we have bodily functions, that we sweat and secrete fluids from various orifices and that those fluids have their own, unique scents that have a multitude of functions, one of them being to attract potential mates!


I think we like to forget our 'beastly' (dirty) primal nature and so to enable our denial, we cover ourselves up, primp and preen (grooming - as the apes do for each other) and have elaborate ideas/standards/techniques/rituals that distance us, take us away from the 'real' states of our bodies. 

Then I think there's a subconscious thing happening on the part of many men who are afraid of adult, powerful women, and so they want to have a relationship with someone with the pre-pubescent look of a bare female child body - only a step or two away from pedophilia, in my opinion...

Most fashion designers are (gay) males who don't like women and are designing for pre-pubescent boy figures.   How can any 'normal' woman fit that physical shape? They can't - only starving models can.   And our young girl children - already sexualised by the fashion industry and media - are learning that's how a woman's body is supposed to look and work and they become victims of eating disorders in an effort to be acceptable.

I think its really sad that women have been brainwashed to think that their normal, natural bodies are ugly and disgusting and unappealing/unattractive...

And then there's the money - billions and billions of dollars being spent in telling women how they have to look, and in creating mostly unhealthy, if not carcinogenic, ecologically damaging products that they need women to buy...

And now you have men buying into that - why men shave/wax their legs/arms etc I don't know... that whole buffed look, the exaggerated abs, the biceps, the product or bleach in the hair...

As a woman I know how much time it takes to maintain that look - and if a man is so into himself and/or so insecure about himself that he needs to go to these lengths to believe himself attractive or to make a statement... then I'm not interested... life's too short to spend so many hours looking in the mirror!

I want to be real, and so I rarely shave... used to and also used to wax... but a challenging life period and other more important things got in the way... didn't have the time or the money to get waxing done professionally (and not enough of a masochist to do it myself!) and got sick of getting the razor out each morning...

And I rebelled against the marketing campaigns that tell a woman she's only desirable if she's totally nude (except for a head full of luscious, flowing shoulder-length curly hair, preferably without any grey in it!) with a painted mask on her face, thin as a rake, with legs up to her armpits and watermelons for breasts ...

But I have to admit I am not at peace with myself over this - the marketing and 'stigma' has had its effect, and I too, fancy that, want to be seen as attractive. Its hard for me to go bare legged in summer, and I wear opaque tights or trousers in winter.   And menopause and changing hormone levels are facts in my life and there are those odd stray hairs appearing on the upper lip and on the chin that come with the wisdom years, that get tweezered out... I hate it that I sometimes still feel ashamed of/insecure about something that is a fact of nature and is not abnormal....

I have some older women friends - true crones - who are wild and natural and sexy and don't give a damn about what anyone thinks, do what they love, are fulfilled in their lives and are truly happy in their 'natural woman' skins - hair and all!

And I want to grow up to be like them - living life free of artificial constraints and standards, living real... and I want that for my daughters... and I want to be with a 'wild' (yet sophisticated and elegant! - no, they are not mutually-exclusionary qualities) man that knows and values that place of freedom and realness for himself, for me and for all living beings...